


Angeleech

by noiproksa



Series: Angeleech [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Banter, Canon Compliant, Case Fic, Family Feels, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hugs, Hurt Castiel, Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Cuddling, Self-Made Family, Sharing a Bed, Team Free Will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-08-20 16:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16559213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiproksa/pseuds/noiproksa
Summary: It was supposed to be an easy hunt, but then everything goes sideways. Dean and Sam have to take care of an injured Cas and find out what is going on with the angel before it is too late.(Intended as gen, but can be read as Destiel pre-slash.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> pre-Season 13, just the original Team Free Will

“So, which way exactly is the cave?” Dean asked, peering over Sam’s shoulder to get a glimpse at the map.

They had left the Impala parked on the side of the country lane and entered the thick forest on foot. It hadn't even been five minutes since the sight of the car had been swallowed up by the trees, and Dean felt like they were already hopelessly lost. That sort of came with the territory of taking on a hunt in the middle of nowhere, though. Apparently, people tended to disappear near a cave with a complicated Indian name that translated as ‘Devil’s Asshole.’ At least, that’s what Cas had told them. Sometimes Dean wondered if Cas was just putting them on, laughing his feathery ass off on the inside while he deadpanned things like “I think we can rule Moses out as a suspect,” or “The closest approximation in the English language is ‘Devil’s Asshole.’”

“This way,” Cas said before Sam could even try to decipher the map, and took the lead, marching confidently through the trees, despite the fact that there was no discernible trail or landmarks that Dean could find.

“Do you actually know that or are you just guessing?” Dean frowned at the back of Cas’ head, but when even Sam rolled up the map with a shrug of his shoulders and hurried after Cas, Dean had no choice but to follow, too.

He sighed, wondering how he had become the one saddled with most of their caving equipment when they had an angel along for the ride. Of course, said angel had only brought himself and his angel blade, and the ridiculous trench coat that any sane person would have left at home on a hot sunny day like this. Even the dappled light through the branches above left Dean sweating and his shirt sticking to his back underneath the bag.

“So, what exactly are we expecting in the cave?” Dean asked after they had been walking for a while.

“Well, we know that the local legend surrounding the cave can’t be true,” Sam said. “Lucifer is definitely not in there.”

Cas had stopped and was now squinting at them, his head tilted to the side. “I thought we came here because of the documentary Dean watched about spelunking.”

“What? No!” Dean objected. “That was so not the reason.”

“Well, there was exactly _one_ person who has gone missing recently,” Sam pointed out.

“And three more during the last decade,” Dean added, walking past Sam and Cas in the direction Cas had been leading them before to get away from this conversation.

Cas’ angel senses hadn’t been wrong. It didn’t take them long to reach a cave that looked exactly like the one they had googled in preparation for the hunt. (And nothing like an asshole.)

Dean clapped his hands and rubbed them together excitedly. “Okay, let’s do this. Everyone—take out your headlamps.”

He took off his backpack and rummaged around inside until he found what he was looking for and strapped the headlamp around his head. When he looked up again, neither Sam nor Cas had followed his example.

“Come on! Was no one listening when I told you what to pack?”

“Not everyone wants to carry all of _that_ around all day,” Sam said, nodding towards Dean’s huge backpack. “Besides, a flashlight will do just fine.” As if to prove his point, he pulled a pocket flashlight out of nowhere and raised his eyebrows at Dean.

“Well, okay. But don’t start bitching to me when you have to fight the monster with one hand.” Dean shrugged his shoulders carelessly, and turned to Cas. “What’s your excuse?”

“I can probably see better in the dark than you can out here,” Cas explained.

Dean rolled his eyes at that. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.” With that he marched towards the entrance of the cave, prepared for any monster that might be hiding out inside.

It wasn’t long before the light from the entrance wasn’t enough to see by anymore and Dean had to turn on his headlamp. Not long after that, Dean had to stop and search his backpack again, this time for the compass.

“So, let’s see,” he said once he had found it. “North is…” Dean was looking at his compass, but before the needle could decide on a position, Cas pointed straight ahead.

“This way,” the angel said and started to move in the direction he had indicated.

Dean, a bit miffed to learn he could have left his compass at home, yelled after him, “Yeah, but we want to go _west_.” His voice was echoing off the walls of the cave.

Cas stopped and turned back around, his brows furrowed. “Why didn’t you ask where west was, then?”

“That’s… never mind.—Just… let’s go this way.”

“You know,” Sammy piped up, “I’m surprised you haven’t flushed out the monster yet with all the bickering.” He had been trailing behind them up until now, but with the change of direction, he was now leading their small group down the narrow path.

“Ha ha,” Dean said humorlessly. “How about instead of complaining, _you_ explain compasses to the angel.”

“Sure.—Cas?” Sam glanced back over his shoulder. “The needle of a compass always points north.”

“I see.”

Sam grinned at Dean. “Done.”

That wasn’t even worth a ‘Bitch!’ It was hardly worth the eye roll it got.

Still, it felt good, the three of them on a hunt together, hunting a ‘normal’ monster for a change. Nothing life-threatening or potentially world-ending. Some lighthearted bickering was part of the fun, no matter what Sammy said. Just Team Free Will saving the day again, the way it was meant to be.

The winding path led them deeper and deeper into the cave and the air quickly grew stale and rather chilly. Dean glanced over at Cas. Warm, cozy Cas who had his trench coat and who had actually not been as insane for wearing it as Dean had originally thought.

“I am not going to give you my coat, Dean,” Cas’ voice interrupted his thoughts, bringing him up short.

Dean rounded on him and pointed a finger accusingly. “Cas, stay out of my head!”

“You were thinking at me very loudly,” Cas stated, but at least he had the decency to look abashed. Good. They had had the privacy conversation enough times for Cas to know better.

“Yeah, well. ‘Thinking’ would be the operative word here,” Dean groused.

“What, there’s no sweater in this huge backpack of yours?” Sam asked, barely able to keep a straight face as he cast a glance back at Dean. “Your documentary or, you know, _common_ _sense_ didn’t warn you that it tends to be colder inside a cave than outside?”

“Don’t you have a monster to find?”

“Don’t _you_?”

“Fine. You may have the coat. I assume I will get it back once we return home?”

“Wait, what?—I never asked for the damned coat!”

“Not out loud…”

***

_The angel took off his outer layer of clothing and held it out to the smaller human, who spluttered and protested, but eventually ended up donning it, making the tall human laugh. Remarkable how close they seemed with the angel. Two species, so different it should be impossible for them to find any kind of common ground. But ultimately, the humans were irrelevant, and their strange relationship to the immortal a passing amusement at most. It had not tasted an angel’s grace in over 2000 years and two measly humans would not keep it from its delicacy._


	2. Chapter 2

Dean kicked at a loose stone and listened to it skitter away through the darkness and drop off the edge of a cliff they'd been skirting for a while. They had been at it for a few hours and still no sign of anything sinister. The documentary had made spelunking sound way more interesting.

Hearing a faint sound, Dean stopped and strained to make it out over the sounds of his companion's boots. “Do you hear that dripping sound?” he asked, and the other two halted as well.

Cas was tilting his head, concentrating on listening to the sound. “It almost sounds like water,” he stated.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Obvious.—Didn’t the locals say something about a ‘Well of Spirits’?”

“Spring of Lost Souls,” Sam corrected him. “The devil supposedly rips the souls from their human bodies and the ‘Spring of Lost Souls’ is where they go.”

“Lucifer has never done such a thing,” Cas stated.

“Seems worth checking out anyway,” Dean decided.

As the sound of the dripping water grew louder, the darkness around them seemed to grow heavier and Dean, who had felt ridiculous wearing Cas’ trench coat, was suddenly very happy to have it.  

Out of nowhere, Dean felt a whoosh, like a great gust of air, and then there was a loud rumble behind him that echoed off the cliffs, rocks falling down into the abyss next to them.

Sam was the first to speak when the rumbling had stopped. “What was that?”

Dean shrugged his shoulders, turning around to see if Cas had any ideas. But the angel had vanished.

“Cas?!” Dean’s frantic voice echoed around the cave. He was desperately looking around, calling out for their angel again. What the hell just happened? Where had he gone? Had the monster snatched him?

“I think I found the hiker,” came Cas’ voice from below. He didn’t sound perturbed in the slightest.

Dean closed his eyes in relief for a second, taking a deep breath. His heart was still pounding a mile a minute. Then he shuffled carefully to the drop off and peered over the edge. The light from his headlamp hardly reached the bottom of the rift, but as far as Dean could tell, Cas seemed to be alright. The body lying next to him, not so much.

“Cas, you okay? What happened?” Sam yelled down to him, as he shone his own flashlight down the rift, further illuminating the bodies below. Those would have been Dean’s questions as well, had he been able to speak around the lump in his throat.

“I seem to have fallen down this hole,” Cas called back.

“No shit,” Dean said, finally finding his voice again. For an angel Cas could be real clumsy sometimes. “Weren’t you the one who told me how great your night vision was?”

“I had no difficulties seeing where I was going. I would not have fallen had you not pushed me.”

Sam’s eyebrows shot up at that. “You pushed him?”

“No, of course not.” And then, louder, so that Cas could hear him: “I did not push you!”

“The fall seems to have killed this human,” Cas informed them, ignoring Dean's protest and apparently working their case down there.

“Great. Now that we know that, why don’t you come back up here?” Dean asked.

“Alright.” After a moment in which nothing happened Cas added, “How do you suggest I do that?”

Right. Angel that couldn’t fly. Luckily, Dean was prepared for all eventualities and took out his rope. Seemed like they would have to get Cas out of there the human way…

Once Cas was standing in front of them again, and Dean had had his fill of gloating over how it was his equipment coming to the rescue, Dean clapped him on the shoulder, making sure he was okay. Up close, Dean realized that Cas looked remarkably dirty. His dress shirt was ripped and muddy, and his hair appeared even more disheveled than usual. The tumble probably hadn’t been all that pleasant, even if it hadn’t been able to kill or seriously injure the angel.

“So, I guess the hunt was a bust,” Sam said.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “No monsters in the _Devil’s Asshole_. Just a tourist who didn’t watch his own feet.”

“Or maybe a friend of his pushed him,” Cas retorted.

“Or maybe he didn’t listen to his friend. Maybe instead of wearing a headlamp, he was bragging about his super-human eyesight.”

Cas frowned at him, tilting his head ever so slightly. “Why would he have been bragging about super-human eyesight? He was human. I assume his eyesight was within normal parameters for humans.”

“Yeah, you know what? I’m not gonna answer that.—Sammy? You take this one.” With that Dean walked ahead. He could still feel the shock from thinking something horrible had happened to Cas deep in his bones. “I’ve had enough of this ‘Devil’s Asshole,’ let’s just get out of here already.”

Behind him, he heard Sam start to explain, “He was just worried about you…”

_Yeah, fuck you, too, Sammy._

***

Once outside the cave, Dean had to blink a few times and squint against the light until his eyes had adjusted to the blinding sunlight. Since it was warmer out here, Dean returned Cas’ coat to him with a mumbled _Thanks_. Sammy didn’t even crack a smile, much less tease him some more about it. The mood on their walk back to the Impala was clearly not as cheerful as it had been earlier.

Dean glanced at Cas and his eyes were drawn to Cas’ hands that were still grazed from when they had pulled him up out of the rift. Cas, who seemed to feel Dean’s eyes on him, looked up and then quickly averted his eyes again, and tugged at his sleeves, pulling them down to cover his hands.

But Dean, never one to back down, didn’t just let it go. “What’s going on there?” he asked, nodding at Cas’ now hidden hands. It seemed like the kind of injury that Cas could easily heal without breaking a sweat.

“What’s going on where?” Sam asked when Cas didn’t answer immediately.

“His hands,” Dean explained. Sam furrowed his brow and leaned over to try to get a glance at them, too.

Cas just buried them deeper within his coat. “They will heal shortly,” he stated, both his voice and his face strangely withdrawn and devoid of expression.

***

Like Cas had predicted, his hands had healed by the time they returned home to the bunker, and all seemed well with the world again. Still, Dean was beat, Sammy couldn’t stop yawning, and even Cas looked kind of tired, which was why when Sam suggested they go to bed early, no one protested.

The next morning Dean didn’t feel well-rested. He had slept far more than his standard four hours, but for some reason he hadn’t slept well—he might have dreamed strange things, but the more he tried to remember the dreams, the less he could grasp them, so he simply stopped trying, shrugging it off as a weird night.

“You look… well,” Sam commented when Dean sat down, inhaling his cup of coffee.

“Bite me, Sammy,” Dean shot back over the rim of his mug.

He didn’t even look up when Cas entered the room and joined them at the breakfast table, mumbling a “Good morning.”

Only when Sam said, “You look even worse than he does,” did he glance up, and he immediately did a double take. He had never seen Cas with such massive dark rings under his eyes—not even during the time he had spent as a human.

“Didn’t sleep well?” Sam asked when Cas didn’t comment on his earlier statement.

“Angels don’t sleep,” came the predictable and fairly standard reply.

“Maybe they should,” Dean said. “You sure you’re okay there, buddy?”

“I am fine, Dean.” Another standard reply Dean had heard all too often. One that, more often than not, meant the exact opposite.

Dean gave a grunt and returned to his coffee. If he hadn't been so deprived of sleep, he might not have given in so easily. Later, he would look back on this moment and regret his decision not to press the issue further.


	3. Chapter 3

To make up for lost time, they went on another hunt the next day. An easy in-and-out type of hunt. Kill three witch sisters who had made it their mission to abduct and kill little kids for their spells. Unfortunately, the witches had other plans and things got violent in a hurry once Dean had killed one of them, shooting her with a witch-killing bullet.

A spell ripped the guns out of their hands and flung both Sam and Dean against the walls of the little white townhouse they’d been using as a base of operation. While the brothers were busy scrambling for cover and not getting hexed, Dean caught a glimpse of Cas cornering one of the remaining witches and laying a hand on her head, ready to smite her.

Her sister began reciting a spell, but was interrupted by Sam, who had used the distraction to crawl towards his gun. He shot the witch from where he was still lying on the floor, and she went down with a guttural screech. This left just one witch. Dean glanced around and found Cas was still trying to smite the last witch. As Dean watched, the light in her eyes flickered and died out. The witch was shaken, but still alive. Before she could retaliate against Cas, Dean had gathered his own gun and fired a shot right between her eyes.

Sam stumbled to his feet. That could have easily gone much worse. Dean let his gaze drift over the three dead witches before he returned his attention to Cas, ready to ask what the hell had just happened, but Sam beat him to it.

“Cas, you mind?” he asked, motioning with a jerk of his gun towards a cut above his eyebrow that was bleeding pretty badly and that would have required stitches in the days before the angel and his healing abilities had joined their little group. There was a tenseness to his movements and a calculating look in his eyes that made Dean feel certain Sam had noticed the failed smiting as well.

“Of course,” Cas said and reached out to Sam with two fingers, placing them against his forehead. The bleeding grew sluggish at the angel’s touch, but the cut did not vanish. Cas pressed his whole hand against Sam’s head, in a motion similar to his smiting gesture, his nostrils flaring and his brows furrowing in deep concentration. Finally, the cut began to grow smaller and smaller, leaving Cas panting and noticeably swaying on his feet by the time it had vanished.

Something was definitely up, and Cas could say he was ‘fine’ all he wanted, Dean would get to the bottom of this.

“Okay, seriously, what’s going on?” Dean snapped. “How come you’re running low on angel mojo again?”

Cas was looking around the room, avoiding eye contact and doing a piss poor job of being subtle about it. “It is not of import.”

“Oh no, not this shit again!” Dean groaned. “I thought we were past all this.”

“I can still be useful,” Cas insisted as if that had anything to do with the topic they were discussing.

“Okay,” Dean said slowly. Before he could say anything else, Cas was already walking away from them. He had learned avoidance from the best after all.

***

Dean was standing next to Cas on the playground, in front of the portal to Heaven. Cas’ shoulders were slumped as he was staring down at the sand box with a forlorn expression.

Dean took a step closer, which made Cas look up with an expression on his face as though he hadn’t been aware of Dean’s presence until just now.

“Dean?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Dean gave the question right back.

Before he got an answer, a lightning bolt struck the sand box and Dean jumped two feet in the air.

“What the _hell_?”

“Not hell,” Cas said who hadn’t moved an inch. “Heaven’s wrath. I can never go back. Not after everything that I have done.” He sounded so lost and homesick that Dean wanted to reach out and offer comfort, put a hand on his shoulder or pull him into his arms or _something_.

But the moment he stepped up to Cas, the playground vanished and they were in a startlingly white room. Dean had never been here before, but the walls gave off a feeling of unease that crept through Dean’s bones and settled in his teeth. Tortured cries that seemed to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at once echoed through the room. The room was completely empty save for an empty chair with straps on the sides clearly designed to tie someone down who didn’t want to be there.

“Cas?” Dean asked when something dawned on him. Cas couldn’t fly. He couldn’t have transported them here. Hence… “Are you in my dreams again?” Although he didn’t usually dream up weird torture rooms he had never been in before. (Now, torture rooms he _had_ been in before? Those dreams, he knew well.)

When he turned to Cas for an answer, however, the angel was cowering in a corner of the room, his hands hugging his knees to his chest and his eyes wide with fear as he stared blindly ahead.

“Cas—” Dean took a step towards the trembling angel and the world abruptly shifted once more. He woke up in his bed in the bunker. No weird torture rooms in sight. And no Cas.

The strange dream didn’t leave Dean alone and he wasn’t able to go back to sleep for what seemed like hours. Finally fed up with tossing and turning to no avail, he decided to go get a midnight snack. When he left his room, however, he stumbled over Cas, who had been sitting in front of his door, leaning against the doorframe. Cas almost toppled over backwards when the door opened.

“Cas?” Dean asked, his eyebrows shooting up. “What are you doing here?” he repeated the question from the dream.

“Watching over you,” the angel answered as he stood, dusting off his coat. “You do not like me watching you sleep, so I stayed out here in consideration of your wishes.”

Dean ran a hand over his face and couldn’t suppress a sigh, suddenly feeling a fresh wave of exhaustion. “Can we… get real here for a moment?”

Cas cocked his head to the side. “I do not know what ‘getting real’ entails. I am real. So are you.”

“Honest answer, no deflection: Why were you sitting on the floor in front of my room in the middle of the night?”

Cas stared at him, unblinking, for a long moment. “I fell asleep,” he finally said as if he were confessing something deeply shameful. As if Dean hadn’t already figured out that he was running so low on angel mojo that he had to sleep in order to recharge his batteries. “I did not enjoy the experience. I thought my time would be better spent watching over you while _you_ slept. You are much better at it than me.”

Apparently, Dean’s brain was still not fully online because there was no way he had understood that right. “Sorry, better at… what? Sleeping?”

He had meant it as a joke, but Cas just looked at him seriously and said, “Yes.”

Dean huffed out a laugh, shaking his head and scrubbing a hand over his face. “I don’t think sleeping is really something you can be good or bad at.”

“Of course a _human_ would think that. You learn how to do that when you are babies. But it is a more intricate process than you realize. For example: How do you humans tell the difference between dream and reality? I never figured it out when I was human. I was too busy with the whole process of falling asleep, trying to exhaust the human body during the day so that it would be easier to fall asleep at night, and looking for sheep to count. Did you know that there are surprisingly little sheep in the city? Of course, as a human, I wasn’t able to just fly to the country to look for them…”

Dean felt his gut clench. They should have been there for Cas when he went through all of that, figuring out how to be human, how to friggin’ _fall asleep_.

He had no idea what to say to that, but fortunately, Cas just kept talking. “I learned that it is easier to fall asleep when you haven’t slept in a few days, but I never understood how to get rid of dreams that show you something you would rather not see. Is there a trick for that?”

“Uhm…” Dean hummed out eloquently. He was so not awake enough for this conversation.

“Or how to know, when you wake up, that it was a dream and now you are back in reality,” Cas added. After this long speech he stared at Dean intensely, obviously waiting for some tips from a born human.

Dean’s tired brain tried to parse through everything Cas had just said and came up with, “Did you… have a nightmare or something?”

“I did not like the dream. It made me feel too… confined in my vessel. My vessel required more air than was available and my vessel’s heart rate increased by 42.7 percent. It also became difficult to think rationally, so the 42.7 percent is only an approximation.”

“Sure,” Dean said, swallowing around a dry lump. “That’s the official dictionary definition of ‘nightmare.’”

“I tried to use my grace to lower my vessel’s heart rate, but it only lowered it slightly. Since I do not wish for my vessel to suffer from heart failure, I am not planning on falling asleep again.”

“Look, I know something is going on with you and we will figure it out. We will. But… if you need to sleep, then you gotta sleep, man.” When he saw Cas open his mouth to protest, he quickly added, “I don’t care that you’re an angel and that your species doesn’t normally sleep. You look about ready to keel over.”

Cas still didn’t seem convinced, so Dean went for broke. “You know what? I’ll watch over you. How’s that sound?—Not like I could fall back asleep at this point anyway,” he mumbled more to himself.

“You’re not an angel. It is not your job to watch over me.”

“Yeah, but you’re family and that kind of makes it my job.—Come on.” Dean held the door open and nodded his head towards the bed.

“Dean, I…” Cas began, but Dean didn’t let him finish.

“You still seem to think that you have some kind of say in the matter. Let me make this easy for you: You don’t. Get in here and sleep your little angel ass off. I’ll make sure your vessel doesn’t suffer from heart failure or whatever.”

Finally, Dean seemed to have worn Cas down. The angel looked towards the bed for a long moment, then back at Dean, about ready to say something, but he stopped when Dean held up a finger as a warning, and eventually Cas sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly, and stepped past Dean into the room.

“Atta angel,” Dean said, patting Cas on the back and following him inside before he shut the door.


	4. Chapter 4

“…He got a good few hours of sleep, but we really have to figure out what’s going on with him,” Dean explained to Sam the next morning over breakfast.

“Well, he’s been cast out of Heaven, maybe that’s why he is running low?” Sam suggested. “Too long away from home?”

“He is home,” Dean said without hesitation. “Right where he’s supposed to be.” Because for once Cas wasn’t running away on some asinine mission, but was staying with them, where he belonged.

Sam shot him a meaningful look. “You know what I mean. He’s an angel. And while I’m thrilled to be having him here, angels aren’t usually supposed to slum it with humans.”

At that moment, Cas walked in, looking a bit better rested, but still not his usual self. He glared at Dean. “I think I have to teach you how to ‘watch over someone,’” he said, complete with air quotes.

“Hey man, I watched over you for like six hours, I just went to get some fuel.” Dean raised his cup of coffee towards Cas and then took a sip. “’Sides, you were doin’ great. Way to sleep. Really got the hang of it.”

Cas stared at him some more, but then inclined his head. “Thank you, Dean,” he said. “You did not have to stay awake for so long on my behalf.”

Dean shrugged, flashing him a smile. “Don’t mention it.”

“Cas, are you… are you bleeding?” Sam asked then, motioning to his own nose to show Cas where the blood was. One drop had formed under Cas’ nose and was now slowly running towards his mouth.

Cas raised his hand and touched the back of his hand to his nose and upper lip. When he brought it back down in front of him, he stared at the red stain on his hand for a long moment. Then he looked up at Dean and Sam with wide eyes.

“I think I might be falling,” he stated. Even though his voice gave nothing away, Dean could swear the hand that was still suspended in midair was trembling slightly.

“But how?” Sam asked. “Why?”

“I don’t know. My grace is being drained. I feel it every time I try to use it.”

“Okay, what’s draining your power?” Dean asked, pushing away his plate with his half-eaten bun, his appetite suddenly gone.

“ _I don’t know_ ,” Cas repeated, his voice lowering and face screwing up in obvious frustration.

“Okay, okay, jeez!—That just means we gotta do some good old-fashioned research. ‘What can drain an angel’s grace?’ Let’s hit the books.” He stood up and clapped his hands together, trying to convey enthusiasm at the prospect of being holed up in the library the whole day.

***

“So, I think we need some more information first,” Sam noted once they had all piled into the library, staring at the overflowing shelves and stacks of books with no idea where to even start looking. “When did you first notice your grace being… drained?”

“That day in the cave. I tried to heal myself, but it proved… difficult.”

Dean remembered how battered Cas had looked when they had left the cave.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sam asked.

“Let me rephrase that,” Dean growled in a harsher tone of voice than Sam had used. “Why didn’t you say anything _after I repeatedly asked you about it_?”

“I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t useful anymore,” Cas said, meeting Dean’s look with a measured gaze of his own. “Especially you, Dean. You told me once, when I had lost my powers, that I am a ‘baby in a trench coat,’ which I do not believe to be very useful.”

Oh, jeez! That had been _years_ ago. Apparently, you had to be careful what you said to an angel, lest he threw it back in your face years down the lane.

“Plus, I did not want to be kicked out of the bunker again,” Cas continued, unaware of the sucker punch to Dean’s gut he had just delivered with these words. “I quite like my room here. It is quaint and has a comfortable bed.—And I suppose what I like best about it is that it is so close to your rooms.”

This statement was followed by silence. Dean had no clue how to react to any of that. He opened his mouth, sure he should say something here, but nothing came out.

“Cas,” Sam came to the rescue. “You do realize that we don’t care about your ‘usefulness.’ We care about _you_.”

“Damn straight,” Dean agreed with maybe a little too much enthusiasm, as Sam winced slightly at his sudden shout. “And we don’t want you to leave. You can stick around forever if you want to.”

Cas didn’t look convinced, so Dean tried another tactic. “Want to know what _I_ like best about your room?”

That earned him a curious head tilt from Cas.

“That it’s so close to ours,” Dean explained.

Cas averted his eyes, rubbing the back of his neck, and Dean couldn’t suppress a smile upon seeing the angel all flustered. He had never seen Cas’ ears turn red before. In fact, he hadn’t even known angels _could_ blush. But then again, maybe it had something to do with his grace being drained…

Before Dean could tease him for it, though, Sam cleared his throat, shooting Dean a sideways look before bringing them back on topic. “So, we’re assuming that whatever happened, happened in the cave, right? So, I say we look for lore on old Indian caves and cross-reference that with anything that refers to an angel’s grace…”

Dean watched Sammy babble on about which section of the library they should take a look at first, and distribute books he thought might be relevant. Since Dean wasn’t big on research himself, he really hoped that Sam would find him something he could point a gun at soon. He was itching to _do_ something instead of sitting around looking at books.

They spent the next couple hours in the library, combing through text after text without any lead on what might be going on.

“Cas, your nose is bleeding again,” Dean exclaimed. Cas, who had been flipping rapidly through his book without touching it, stopped and wiped at his nose, smearing the blood across his face.

“Maybe you shouldn’t overexert yourself,” Dean suggested. How dumb could one angel be? Just a couple of hours ago he had told them that his grace was being drained every time he used it. Yet here he was, using his grace for something as foolish as reading a book.

“I would hardly call turning the page of a book ‘overexerting myself.’”

“Well, it is if you use your grace to do it. You’ve been human before. You know how to do it the human way. So do it the human way!”

“Hey guys!” Sam hadn’t paid them any mind, even when Dean’s voice had grown exponentially louder towards the end of their argument, but now he looked up and there was a familiar gleam in his eyes that always brought a smile to Dean’s face. His little brother had found him something he could point a gun at! About time!

“Get this,” Sam started. “According to ancient lore, there’s this creature, sort of like a leech, that feeds on angelic grace.”

“Okay,” Dean said slowly. “If such a… an ‘angeleech’ had attached itself to Cas, wouldn’t we have seen it?” He looked at Cas, who as so often wore three layers of clothing, and amended, “Or at least Cas would have realized it?”

“No, that’s just it,” Sam said, holding the book up for them to see and pointing at a passage as though he expected Dean to be able to read that tiny print from where he was. “It’s more of a parasite really. It’s very small and it can enter the angel’s vessel through the mouth, nose or even ears and then… does its thing, I guess.” He turned back to the book, skimming over another paragraph. “It likes damp, dark places. An old cave would have been perfect for it! It all checks out.”

“Well, okay then. How do we gank it?” Finally they had a name for that son of a bitch that thought it could just… drain Cas’ grace or whatever right in front of Dean’s eyes. Yeah, no. Not gonna happen. Not on his watch.

“I don’t know.” Sam furrowed his brows at the old tome in his hand, as though accusing it of hiding the secret from them. “Have you ever heard of such a parasite, Cas?”

“Angeleech,” Dean threw in. After all, no one had come up with a better name thus far.

“Only stories. I always assumed my brothers and sisters had made them up and told them in order to keep angels from lingering too long on Earth.”

“Stranger danger warning for little angels?” Dean asked. “Sounds like a fun bedtime story.”

Cas squinted at him. “Angels do not have a ‘bedtime’ and it was not a fun story. Quite the opposite. It said the more you use your grace, the more the creature would suck it dry, ultimately leaving nothing but the soulless vessel behind.”

“Wow, that’s… grim,” Dean said. “So what, if we don’t do anything, the angeleech will eat all of your grace and you’ll become human again?”

Sam cleared his throat uncomfortably, bringing the attention back to himself and his book. “Not according to this book. Taking away the grace weakens the angel and makes the vessel susceptible to diseases and such. But the… the angeleech doesn’t stop there. It sucks the life force out of both vessel and angel until they… until there is no more life force left.”

Dean swallowed, at a loss for what to say. Of course, they wouldn’t let that happen, but that was one hell of a worst case scenario.

Cas got a faraway look on his face and a moment later, he was turning dangerously pale and his nose started bleeding again.

“Could you stop using your grace for _one_ _second_?!” Dean snapped, exasperated.

“I can stop using my grace for more than one second,” Cas retorted.

“And yet, here we are.” Dean took a tissue out of his jeans pocket and handed it to Cas, who looked at it cluelessly, turning it around in his hands. “What did you even do?” Dean asked.

“I tried to ascertain if there was a parasite somewhere in my vessel. I thought I might be able to heal myself,” Cas muttered and then went back to studying the tissue as if it were the most interesting thing he had ever seen.

Dean sighed. “So that’s a hard no on the healing front.”

Cas unfolded the tissue, looked at it again, and then carefully pressed it to his bleeding nose.

“So what do we do?” Sam asked, who was apparently finished reading through the rest of the entry on angeleeches. The book was folded shut and tucked under one arm.

It sucked that they hadn’t found a way to gank it, yet, but then the solution suddenly came to Dean. “The angeleech feeds off of his grace,” he repeated what Sam had told them. Then he turned to Cas. “You said your grace was drained every time you used it. So if you don’t use your grace, it can’t hurt you, right?” Looking at Sam, he repeated, “Right?”

“I guess…” Sam said. “At the very least it should give us some time to figure out what to do next.”

Dean turned back to Cas, pointing a finger at the angel. “So that’s a strict ban on using your grace. For whatever purposes, got it?”

“Yes, Dean.”

“Good. Now let’s put this angeleech on a strict grace-free diet.”


	5. Chapter 5

They spent the better part of the day searching for more lore on angeleeches, but turned up nothing. That evening, Dean stooped so low as to pray to any angel who would listen. If Cas couldn’t heal himself, maybe another angel would be able to do it.

He was pretty sure Cas wouldn’t be on board with a plan that could potentially put other angels at risk since they were dealing with a grace-sucking parasite, so he told him nothing. The last time he had prayed to a random angel for help, they had ended up paying a hell of a price for it, but desperate times called for desperate measures. No angel seemed to be interested in answering his prayers this time anyways.

“Please! I need help!” Dean tried it once more, lowering himself to begging because he was out of options.

“Dean, you cannot pray to other angels,” Cas’ voice broke through Dean’s thoughts from where the only angel in the entire universe he _wasn’t_ praying to had appeared in his doorway. The fallen angel was glowering at him, but the effect was lost under the thick layer of exhaustion that blanketed everything he did lately.

“Oh yeah? Watch me.” Dean closed his eyes and raised his voice. “I am praying to any angel who got their ears on...”

“Dean—”

“…to stop being such selfish pricks and come rescue one of your own.” When he opened his eyes again, he saw that Cas had closed his and was pinching the bridge of his nose.

“They will not answer your prayers in any case,” Cas said, opening his eyes again. “They do not think of me as one of their own.”

“I don’t care. And if I have to pray their ears off, I’m fully prepared to annoy them into helping us out.”

Cas shrugged his shoulders, but the movement seemed mechanical and forced. “They probably ‘put you on mute’ already,” Cas grumbled, punctuated with a pair of air quotes. “You’re the human who ‘corrupted’ me, so if there is anyone they hate more than me, it is probably you.” This was followed by another one of those jerking shoulder shrugs.

Dean snorted. “Yeah, well, feeling’s mutual.” An image of Cas standing in front of the portal to Heaven, shoulders hunched, flashed through his mind. Dream Cas certainly hadn’t been indifferent to his status as outcast. “You know what? You shouldn’t care either. No offense, but your species is kind of weird.”

Cas looked up at that, squinting at him. “So is yours. What is your point?”

“Point is,” Dean said, “That Sammy, me and you—we make a way better garrison than all of your angel pals combined. So if they don’t want you? Their loss.” And for good measure, he added after a beat, “Our gain.”

A tired smile spread across Cas’ face, but before he could say anything, his smile split into a huge yawn, which he didn’t even bother to cover with his hand.

Dean couldn’t remember ever having seen Castiel yawn before. “What was that?” he asked.

“A yawn,” Cas answered promptly. “Humans tend to do it when they are tired.” Then, as if something just occurred to him, he added, “You are human, you should know that. Did I yawn incorrectly? Is there a social stigma which I have failed, such as blessing someone when they sneeze?”

“No, yes, no,” Dean babbled as Cas tilted his head, his eyes flashing bright with alarm over some imagined slight. “I just meant, since when are _you_ yawning?” Even as he was asking, Dean had a feeling he already knew. His hands curled into fists at his sides.

“It would seem that my vessel needs more sleep.”

“Good idea.” Dean forced his hands to relax. “Mine, too.”

Cas took a step towards the door, but then he stopped, hesitating for a moment before he turned around again.

“Dean?” he asked. “Will you sing me a lullaby again?”

Dean huffed a self-conscious laugh and, to his mortification, felt his face go hot. “Okay, first off, that was not a ‘lullaby,’ that was a humming… thing.—And second, we agreed not to mention that again.”

Cas frowned at him. “You said not to mention it to Sam.” He looked around the room before his eyes settled back on Dean. “Sam is not here.”

“You know what? There’s other tricks you can use to fall asleep. Ever tried warm milk?”

Cas stared at him for a moment with that intense angelic stare of his that made Dean feel like he could see right into Dean’s soul (which he probably could) before he came to his conclusion, “This conversation is making you uncomfortable.”

“I’m not… I don’t… I’m just…” Dean tried to justify himself, rather unsuccessfully.

“As I said: Your species is very weird,” Cas interrupted his babbling. “Why would that make you uncomfortable?”

“You know what’s making me uncomfortable? You talking about me being uncomfortable.” After a beat of silence in which Cas was looking at him with huge sad eyes, Dean shook his head, heaving a sigh. “Fine, you’ll get your lullaby.” Then he mumbled to himself, too quiet for Cas to hear, “Wants a lullaby to fall asleep, but doesn’t want to be called ‘baby in a trench coat.’”

***

 _Don't carry the world upon your shoulders_  
For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool  
By making his world a little colder

The lyrics echoed through the nothingness and the strange thing was, it sounded kind of like his own voice. That was his first clue that he had fallen asleep. The second clue was the house-sized leech that almost crushed him before crawling on its way, unperturbed. The dreamscape changed and instead of nothingness, Dean found himself somewhere in the bunker. Only it was distorted somehow. The colors were all wrong and the room looked strange in a way Dean couldn’t immediately identify.

“I’m just saying—” Sammy’s voice came from behind him. “—What good is an angel without its powers?” Dean turned around and saw Sam standing in front of Cas, his arms crossed tight across his chest and his face set in a stony expression that appeared alien on his features.

Standing next to him was Dean himself, only a dream version of him. Or rather, a nightmare version because he, too, was looking at Cas as though he were a particularly filthy rat that had made its home in their cupboards. “Yeah, what he said,” Not-Dean grunted out and it was eerie how that sounded exactly like him and nothing like him all at the same time. “What, you thought we’d ever be friends with an _angel_? Angels are selfish dicks. I mean, we can tolerate you as long as you’re useful, but without your powers you can get lost.”

_And anytime you feel the pain…_

“Cas?” Dean asked, which made the angel turn around to look at him and then glance back and forth between the two Deans, apparently not quite sure who to turn to. “This isn’t _my_ nightmare, is it?”

The frown on Cas’ face vanished in the wake of realization. “They are not real.” At that moment the fake Sam and Dean disappeared. “—Are you here to teach me how to avoid these kinds of dreams?”

“I have no idea _how_ I’m even here,” Dean said. “I can’t dreamwalk.”

“My apologies. It seems I accidentally entered your dream and brought fragments of my own dreams along with me.”

Around them, black nothingness was closing in, slowly consuming the strange bunker.

“You what?!—Dammit, Cas! I said no using your grace! Do you _want_ to die?”

“I said ‘accidentally,’” Cas repeated.

“Well, what are you still doing here, then? Get out of my dream… your dream… Just… wake up or something!”

The next moment, Dean jolted awake in the chair next to his bed, in which there was still an angel fast asleep. Dean stood slowly—his neck was stiff from the uncomfortable sleeping position—and moved to shake Cas’ shoulder to wake him up. He hesitated, one hand hovering over his friend’s shoulder, when he realized that Cas probably wasn’t using his grace anymore because he wasn’t dreamwalking into Dean’s dreams at the moment. Plus, the angel could probably use the rest. He looked like having used his grace to dreamwalk around had made a good meal for the angeleech.

Just as Dean was pulling his hand back, Cas’ eyes snapped open and he sat up in the bed. “Dean,” he said when his eyes fell on the man still hovering over the edge of the mattress. Then a crease appeared on his forehead and he narrowed his eyes. “Is this real?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

 _How do you humans tell the difference between dream and reality?_ He had never gotten around to teaching Cas about that aspect of humanity, so he added, “See? If you look around, everything is normal, right? There’s no giant leech and the walls look like they’re supposed to.”

Cas was looking around, but he didn’t seem convinced.

“Do you remember how you got here?” Dean tried another technique.

“Of course. I went to your room last night to stop you from praying to strangers, then my vessel got tired and you sang me ‘Hey Cas’ and I fell asleep.”

“It is actually called ‘Hey Jude,’ I was just… Never mind.—See, in a dream you don’t usually know how you got there.”

Cas seemed to consider this, which was taking too long for Dean’s taste. He leaned forward once more and said, “Or you could just—” Instead of finishing the sentence he slapped Cas across the face. “See? Awake.”

Before Cas—staring wide-eyed with a hand held up to cup the cheek Dean had slapped—could question this technique as well, Dean changed the topic, “So,” he began. They would have to talk about it sooner or later. “That was one stupid dream, huh?”

Even though he was trying to be understanding (dreams were kind of private after all), he couldn’t keep the anger at bay. Apparently, Cas still didn’t trust them to have his back. Which, come to think of it, was part of the reason they were in this mess in the first place.

Since Cas didn’t see fit to answer, Dean decided to tell him just that. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe, if you had told us right at the beginning, we might have been able to beat it? We would have figured it out, like we always do, and maybe you still had enough grace then so that you could have kicked this angeleech’s butt out of your vessel!”

Cas was still just staring at him and didn’t even try to defend himself.

“I’m just… I’m tired, man,” Dean explained, heaving a weary sigh. “Of you not trusting us. Trusting me. I mean, I get it, I messed up when I…” _Kicked you out on the street to fend for yourself when you needed us the most._ Dean couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence so he said instead, “…With the whole Gadreel thing. I messed up bad. But I said I was sorry, and I meant it. I don’t… I don’t know what else to _do_ here.”

“It is not that I don’t trust you,” Cas finally said, which made Dean snort because—yeah, right. “I simply do not wish to be a burden. I am an Angel of the Lord. I should be powerful enough to shield you from harm.”

“Do I look like I need ‘shielding’?” Dean asked, a bit impatient in his effort to get through to the angel. Before Cas could give him an answer he didn’t like, Dean continued, “We shield each other. That’s what family is all about. You don’t get to hog all the responsibility.”

“No, that is _your_ job,” Cas deadpanned.

Dean didn’t have a good comeback for that, so instead he squeezed his eyes shut, massaged the bridge of his nose and said upon opening his eyes again, “I’m gonna go back to sleep. I haven’t had my four hours yet because _someone_ decided to crash my dreams.”

“I didn’t decide,” Cas defended himself. “As I explained to you, I was doing it subconsciously.” He was still just sitting there, right in the middle of Dean’s bed, so Dean had to get more direct.

“That was an invitation to vacate my bed. I’m not sleeping in that uncomfortable chair again.”

“Oh,” Cas said. “Right.” And he finally got up to return to his own room.

As soon as Dean was alone in his room again he flopped onto his bed and buried his head in his pillow, which still smelled faintly of the angel. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He fell asleep faster than he would have expected, his worries forgotten, if only for a moment.


	6. Chapter 6

“You have got to stop dreamwalking, man!” Dean growled at Cas the next morning, while scrubbing at his own tired eyes at the breakfast table.

It had happened twice more that night, making it impossible for either Dean or Cas to get a good night’s sleep. Both times, Dean had found himself in strange places and had figured out pretty fast that he wasn’t in his own dreams anymore. Mainly because they had revolved around worries that were utterly ridiculous. Angels he had never even seen before accused Cas of betraying his own kind, and even ‘Dick Sam’ and ‘Dick Dean’ had made another appearance, though the real Dean had made sure to quickly chase them off.

“I cannot control it,” Cas repeated for what was probably at least the tenth time. As if that was some sort of excuse Dean would accept. Especially in light of the fact that Cas looked exactly like an angel whose life force was being sucked out of him as they spoke. His eyes looked bloodshot and he seemed barely able to keep them open.

“Cannot control what?” Sam asked as he entered the kitchen. He didn’t look like he had gotten a whole lot of shut-eye either. Just peachy. Team Free Will was officially running on fumes.

“Our angel here thought it was a great idea to use his grace in order to go for a nice little stroll through my dreams last night,” Dean filled him in as Sam made a straight line for the coffee machine.

“I did not think it was a ‘great idea.’” Cas twisted around in his chair to explain himself to Sam. “The angeleech wants me to use my grace so it can feed on it. I cannot control it while I am asleep.”

“Which means that we have to watch over him 24/7 from now on to make sure he doesn’t use his grace subconsciously. At least until we get rid of this thing.”

Sam looked up at that, pausing in his motion to fill his coffee cup to raise his eyebrows at his brother. Then he sighed and set the coffee pot down to rub a hand over his face as though he could physically scrub off the fatigue. “About that… I was searching the library last night after you guys turned in and as far as I can tell, there is no way to get rid of the leech without killing the host.”

Dean groaned. “Sugarcoat it, why don’t you?”

“But then I got to thinking...” Sam continued and turned to Cas. “You said, the angeleeches only leave the ‘soulless vessels’ behind once they’re done with the angel.—Where do the souls go?”

“They are eaten by the angeleech,” Dean said. “Come on, Sammy, keep up.”

“Or are they?” Sam asked, raising his eyebrows and looking from Dean to Cas and back. “Angeleeches eat _grace_ , don’t they? All of the texts were very specific about that, so what use do they have for the human soul? I didn’t think about it before because Cas doesn’t have to share his vessel with a human soul anymore. But then I thought of the ‘Spring of Lost Souls…’”

“You think that’s where the human souls ended up?” Dean interrupted him warily.

“I mean… could be, right? We turned around before we ever even found this spring.—Maybe we should go back and take a closer look?”

Dean’s head was starting to hurt and he rubbed his temples. He felt like he hadn’t slept in _days_. “I hate to play the devil’s asshole… advocate,” he quickly corrected himself. Luckily, neither Sam nor Cas seemed awake enough to make fun of his slip. “But let’s say that’s true. How would some souls who have been ripped from their bodies be able to help us?”

“I don’t know, man,” Sam said, taking a seat at the table and blowing on the mug he had finally finished fixing. “I’m grasping at straws here.”

Cas looked at Sam’s hands wrapped around his steaming mug, and frowned. “Not literally,” Dean explained automatically, which got him an “Oh” from Cas.

“So we’re going back?” Sam asked.

“Sure.” It wasn’t like Dean had come up with a better plan. “Because it was so much fun last time.”

***

“I don’t care if you’re batman himself. You’re wearing it this time around.” Dean was holding out a headlamp to Cas, who wasn’t all too thrilled about the prospect of wearing it.

“To be fair,” Sam chimed in from where he was doing a last check of their supplies by the cave’s mouth, “Batman can’t naturally see in the dark. So if Cas _were_ batman, he’d have way better gizmos than that.” He nodded towards the old headlamp, but shut up when Dean glared at him.

“After what happened last time, we’re not taking any chances,” Dean said and took it upon himself to strap the headlamp around Cas’ head.

“It had nothing to do with my eyesight, you…” Cas began to protest, but Dean didn’t let him finish.

“So help me God if you say one more time that I pushed you…”

“Guys?” Sam butted in again. “Don’t you think it makes more sense that it was the angeleech?”

That brought both Cas and Dean up short.

“Sure. Why the hell not?” Dean snorted. Because apparently, getting shoved into rifts by disembodied parasites of the holy had totally become their lives.

They walked in silence for most of the way, too tired to keep the conversation flowing.

“How do you keep walking for so long without using any grace to heal your aching feet?” Cas asked out of nowhere.

He looked utterly ridiculous with the headlamp strapped around his head. Bits of hair were sticking up in haphazard directions, and a small red line was forming across his forehead where the strap may be a bit too tight. Maybe that had been the reason why he had refused to wear it in the first place.—A vain angel, who would have thought?

“Don’t you dare,” Dean warned. “Absolutely no use of angelic powers whatsoever,” he reminded Cas.

“I hadn’t planned on using my grace,” Cas replied sullenly. His shoulders were hunched and he had a mutinous sparkle to his eyes, reminding Dean of watching over Sam when they were teenagers. Briefly, he wondered if maybe this attitude was the result of the angel growing more human again as the leech drained away his grace. It was an uncomfortable thought, and Dean didn’t voice it.  

They found their way to the place where Cas had fallen (or had been pushed or whatever) the last time. Only this time, they continued on their way, following the sound of the dripping water, with no great rumbles, and without losing anyone to the pit.

“What is _that_?” Sam asked when they reached what looked like a huge lair some indiscriminate amount of time later. A weird, shimmering light that Dean couldn’t make sense of was coating one corner of the spacious cavern.

“My money is on the ‘Spring of Lost Souls,’” Dean said.

As they got closer, they could make out that it wasn’t just _one_ source of light. There were hundreds of tiny lights buzzing around, disoriented, colliding with the walls of the cave, and giving off miniscule ‘pinging’ sounds that echoed off the walls. The noise he had heard the first time they had been here hadn’t been dripping water after all.

“Are those…” Sam began and had to swallow. “Are those really souls?”

Dean knew where he was coming from. They seemed way too tiny, more like fireflies than souls.

Cas had stepped closer to the tiny lights and was inspecting them through narrowed eyes. “No. They are no more than shattered pieces of souls.”

“Are they… alive?” Dean asked.

“Neither dead nor alive,” Cas replied. “They are… something in between. _Lost_. The legend got at least that part right.”

Cas reached out towards the soul pieces and closed his eyes. “They are the last pieces the angeleech left of them,” he said slowly, as if he were translating their thoughts into English. “Apparently, it can also feed on human souls if there are no angels around. These pieces—it is like the angeleech’s way of leaving an apple core behind.” He let his arm fall back to his side and opened his eyes again. “I do not believe they can be of any help to us.”

“So do we just… leave them here?” Sam asked. “I mean, I know they’re not _really_ alive, but you were just communicating with them, so that means, a part of them is?”

Dean was about to say that they didn’t have time to play heroes for some souls they didn’t even know when their angel needed their help, but Cas beat him to it. “Not communicating,” he corrected Sam gently. “I was merely listening to an… _echo_ of their former souls.—They are broken beyond repair, and too much has been consumed. They have no thoughts, no feelings or individuality, just fragments of memories of their last moments before being consumed by the angeleech. Unfortunately, they can never move on to Heaven.”

No one seemed to have an answer to that, and things lapsed into silence for another stretch.

Then Dean spoke up. “I can’t believe that I’m the one to suggest this to a former soul-junkie, but… what about taking them to boost your powers?” Dean asked.

When both Cas and Sam looked at him as though he had grown a second head, he explained, “You know, kick-start your mojo to smite the angeleech. Or at least kick it out of your vessel or whatever.”

“Am I speaking Enochian?” Cas asked slowly. “These soul pieces—they are _broken_. They are not going to ‘boost my powers.’ Because they are not whole souls.”

“Jeez, no need to get touchy,” Dean grumbled.

“That could work, though, right?” Sam asked excitedly. “Soul boost? You could touch my soul to…”

“Yeah, not gonna happen, Sammy,” Dean interrupted him. But he had to admit that the idea in itself wasn’t half bad, which is why he said, “It’s gonna be me.” And when Cas and Sam looked at him with identical frowns on their faces again, he added, “Cas and I have a more ‘profound bond’ after all.” He winked at Cas to make light of the situation, even though he really wasn’t feeling all too jovial.

“It is a very painful proce—” Cas began, but Dean interrupted him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know all about it. Read all the warning labels. We getting on with this or what?”

Cas was looking at Sam as if hoping for assistance, but he had sorely miscalculated if he thought Sam wouldn’t do whatever it took to save Cas, too. “Yeah, I’m with Dean on this,” Sam declared. “I mean, I’m happy to offer _my_ soul, but he does have a point. You so have a connection…”

“I do not wish to harm you,” Cas tried, turning back to Dean.

“And you won’t,” Dean assured him. He was looking deep into the angel’s eyes, trying to show him the trust he had in his friend. “Come on, Cas. You’re stronger than this pathetic angeleech. I say we kick its ass. With your remaining grace and my soul—it better run for the hills, right?”

“If you are quite sure…” Cas said, hesitantly.

“I’m sure,” Dean replied immediately, shaking out his arms and taking a deep breath in preparation for the invasive procedure. “Go for it,” he ordered and closed his eyes.

The next thing he knew was pain. Excruciating pain that shot through his entire body. He clenched his teeth until he thought they might shatter, but couldn’t hold back the screams of agony. He kept telling himself that he was doing this for Cas and it would get rid of this damned angeleech. Just a little longer. Only the pain didn’t stop. Somewhere along the line it occurred to him in the back of his mind that something was seriously wrong. More wrong than an angel’s hand reaching inside his body.

When the pain finally receded and he opened his eyes, he found himself sprawled on the chilly cave floor. Sam’s voice, distorted and frantic brought his attention to where Cas was also laying on the ground, writhing and twisting as if in agony and struggling to roll himself onto his stomach. Sam kneeled over him, looking like he wasn’t sure if he should be holding the angel down or not.

While Dean watched Cas finally right himself and begin crawling towards him, a shuddering cough wracked through Dean’s chest, and something wet splattered across the stone beneath him. One hand raised to wipe at his lips and he saw the bright flash of crimson blood smeared across his wrist. That… could not be good.

“Cas, don’t!” Sam’s shout cut through the fog in Dean’s mind and when he glanced back up, Cas was reaching out a hand to lay on his shoulder.

“Cas, no!” Dean begged, trying to roll away from the angel, but he was too weak and his body refused to do as he willed. “Please don’t,” he tried again, hating the way his voice trembled. But it was too late. He already felt the healing energy flow throughout his entire body, taking the physical pain away and leaving an entirely different kind of pain that made a tear run down the side of his face.

Dean jerked away from the angel as soon as he was strong enough to break the contact between them. Cas flopped back to the ground, unmoving and looking dangerously pale, blood running out of his nose, ears and eyes.


	7. Chapter 7

“Cas, you son of a bitch!” Dean hollered. “You don’t get to give up on me now!” The sharp ring of him slapping the angel’s face echoed through the roomy cavern.

Cas mumbled something unintelligible in Enochian and then cracked open one eye in a poorly focused sort of glare. “Why are you checking to see if I am dreaming?” he asked.

Dean closed his eyes and sat back on his heels, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, willing his racing heart to slow down.

“Cas, what… what _was_ that?” Sam asked. His voice shook slightly as he was kneeling down next to Cas, helping him sit up.

“We seem to have angered it.” Cas’ face was drawn and pale. “How are you, Dean? It doesn’t still have a hold on your soul, does it?”

As the adrenaline began to seep from his blood and his hands began to tremble, Dean did what he did best in these situations where his loved ones tried to kill themselves for his sake; he took a deep breath, opened his mouth, and screamed, “What the hell is _wrong_ with you, man?! You could have died! I _told_ you not to heal me. I _told_ you!” Dean would go so far as to say he had _begged_ , but the stupid, gullible, stubborn angel had just gone ahead and given the angeleech exactly what it wanted. “Sam, back me up, here.”

Cas didn’t give Sam time to answer before cutting in, his voice ragged and weak, “I cannot allow you to suffer for my failures. Whatever it costs me.” He was looking Dean right in the eyes, his intense gaze never wavering. “You cannot stop me.”

“Are you freaking kidding me?!” Dean spat. “You think we won't suffer just because you shoulder the burden all on your own until it kills you?!”

The crease between Cas’ eyebrows deepened as confusion flickered across his face.

Sam rested a gentle hand on the angel’s shoulder. “He means that whatever it costs us to help you, losing you would be so much worse, Cas,” the younger brother explained softly. “You're family. We'll do whatever it takes to keep you safe, so please, don't give up.”

“Yeah,” Dean chimed back in, struggling to his feet and reaching out a hand to help the angel up. “What he said. We don't ever give up, you got that? We're going to stick together and come out of this alive. All of us.”

Cas was silent for a moment, then dropped his gaze to the floor and nodded dutifully before taking the offered hand. Whether he had seen the sense in Sam’s words, or had just run out of energy for the fight, Dean couldn’t be sure. He hoped, for all of their sake, it was the former.

***

The ride back to the bunker was long and tense. Cas had slumped heavily into the back seat, and even the radio couldn’t drown out the silence that reined between the brothers as they constantly monitored him to ensure he was awake so he couldn’t be forced to use up the rest of his grace dreamwalking. Once they were back at the bunker, they scrambled to come up with another plan of action. Always, someone had an eye on Cas who seemed to be growing weaker by the hour.

“I finally got a hold of Rowena,” Sam reported as he entered the library, tucking his phone back into his pocket. “She thinks our best bet would be to use the dreamwalking _against_ the angeleech and try to fight it from inside of the dreams.”

“Seriously?” Dean looked up from a very dull book about angels and their relationships to their vessels to fix his brother with a flat look. “That’s the best advice she could come up with?—Hundreds of years of experience and she’s as useless as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.”

“She gave me this spell…” Sam ignored his brother’s complaints and pulled a folded up piece of paper from the pocket of his shirt. “I’m not sure if it’s real or if it’s a hoax, but…” He paused and stole a glance at Cas who had his head in his hands and hadn’t shown any indication he was even aware of their conversation. The unspoken _We’re running out of options_ was clear in Sam’s eyes. “It’s supposed to help us take control of the dream world or something?”

“So, let me get this straight; Our best plan is to play right into the angeleech’s hand and force Cas to use up the last of his grace? When an angeleech is sucking the grace right out of him?” Dean summed up. “And to top it off, this advice comes from a very… _reliable_ witch. Who hasn’t ever fucked us over.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Sam said. “But I really don’t think she wants Cas to die. And she knows that we’d come after her if that happened, so… I think this might be the real deal.”

Dean took a long breath and cast a look back at Cas who appeared to have slid even further into a semiconscious state, and was moaning softly. If they didn’t do anything soon, he might end up dying anyways.

“Okay, whatever,” Dean breathed out, making a split-second decision. If Rowena was trying to trick them, he _would_ go after her. “Go get the ingredients. I’ll fill in Cas.”

Sam nodded. “See you in your room in ten?” he asked and hurried away.

Dean pulled himself to his feet and crossed over to where Cas was slumped down in his chair, his head lolling to the side at an awkward angle that made Dean’s neck hurt just to look at it. Dean shook the angel’s shoulder and said, “Cas. C’mon, let’s get you to bed.”

“No,” Cas mumbled, swatting at the hand. “Dean said not to fall asleep.”

“Yeah, and I can tell that you’re really making an effort.—But we got a new plan.”

***

The ten minutes passed at a sluggish pace. By the time Sam arrived the promised ten minutes later, balancing a huge bowl with all manner of exotic leaves and feathers and some unidentified liquid, Dean had just been about to go looking for him to demand he hurry his ass up. Cas was lying on his back in Dean’s bed, sweating and mumbling, and smearing blood all over the pillow as he rocked his head back and forth. They seemed to be running out of time.

“Finally,” Dean said, taking a closer look at the bowl Sam was just placing on the desk. “So, what does this spell do, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Sam shrugged as he pulled a mortar from his pocket and began to crush the strange mixture together. “Rowena wasn’t feeling very talkative. She gave me the basics and hung up before I could ask too many questions.”

Dean let out another long huff. Rowena was in for some nasty phone calls when this was over, but it would have to wait. They didn’t have time for this right now.

“Alright,” Sam breathed as he leaned back from the bowl, apparently satisfied with the contents for now. “She said to apply the tincture to the part where it could access his grace easiest?”

“That would be my vessel’s throat,” Cas explained through clenched teeth.

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound suspicious _at all_ ,” Dean mumbled, but he was already retrieving a washcloth from by the sink and dipped it into the bowl before moving over to the bedside. Cas was tilting his head back, exposing his throat so that Dean could smear the gooey liquid all over the angel’s throat. Some of it dripped down onto the pillow, mixing in with the little specks of drying blood. He’d probably end up burning his pillow.

“Done. What’s next?” Dean asked as soon as his task was complete, turning back around to Sam.

“I guess we move on to the dreamwalking part of the plan?” Sam’s response was more like a question than Dean would have liked it to be. “I’ll monitor you and wake you up if it looks like you’re in trouble.”

This was a sound plan. What could go wrong? Dean draped the washcloth over the edge of the bowl and took the pillow he had procured earlier from the chair. “Scoot over,” he told Cas. “I’m not taking the chair.”

“What’s that?” Sam asked when Dean took a sleeping pill from the nightstand and swallowed it dry.

“What, you think I can just fall asleep on demand?” Dean asked, reclining back on his bed in the space Cas had made for him and closing his eyes with a deep breath.

Cas, of course, couldn’t just let him fall asleep in peace. “Dean?” he asked.

Dean turned his head to look at him, already a bit drowsy. “Yeah?”

Cas was looking at him with a strange hopefulness, but then his eyes flitted over to Sam, who was sitting by the bed. For a moment, the angel was looking back and forth between Dean and Sam. Then he averted his eyes and mumbled, “Never mind.”

Dean heaved a sigh and thought, _To hell with it_. If Sam wanted to tease him about it later, Dean had tons of stuff to retaliate with. And so he began to sing quietly, “ _Hey Cas, don't make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better_.” He fell asleep somewhere during the first chorus.

 


	8. Chapter 8

The first thing Dean saw when he blinked open his eyes, was a pair of all too familiar eyes blinking right back at him. Alastair. Great—it was one of those dreams. He hadn’t had one of those in a while, but there was the demon, ready to taunt him or insult him or torture him… Dean didn’t really care. He was on a mission here.

Alistair's lips peeled back into a wicked grin, but before he could open his mouth, Dean shoved him roughly aside and barked at him, “Get lost. I don’t have time for this!” He turned around and tried to find Cas, but this was clearly one of his own dreams.

“Figures,” he mumbled, striking out in a random direction into the amorphous darkness around him. “The one time I need you to dreamwalk your feathered ass over here…”

He traveled through a world of shadows and mist. The rolling fog around him would occasionally thin out enough that he could catch glimpses of what he assumed must be his own dreams going on without him. There were snatches of screams and laughter, flickers of flame and rotten old houses.

Somewhere in his peripheral vision he saw Sammy gulp down gallons of demon blood, but he was so well and truly past _those_ dreams that he didn’t even slow down.

“Come on, Cas, where are you?” Dean called into the living nothing. He couldn’t just keep wandering in circles, stuck in his own dreams, while Cas was off fighting his own inner demons. And maybe real demons as well. Or at least angeleeches… Suddenly, an idea struck him. He stopped dead in his tracks and screwed his eyes shut.

Hoping Cas could hear him even in his sleep, he began to pray. “Castiel. I’m praying to you. I need you.—To come into my dream.”

He opened his eyes, but there was no Cas. Admittedly, it was a bit of a long shot anyways.

 _Too late_ , a disembodied voice hissed out from all around him. _The angel is mine._

He had no idea if that voice was a dream manifestation of his insecurities about being unable to save Cas or if it really was the angeleech. Either way, Dean wasn’t about to let it go without a fight.

“Oh, yeah?” he yelled into the darkness above him. “Then how about you show your ugly mug and we’ll see about that.”

He really hoped he wasn’t just talking to his subconscious, losing valuable time.

_I have no interest in your tainted soul. An angel’s grace tastes so much better. Can you feel the angel using its grace?—Delicioussssssssss!_

“Cas!” Dean screamed, forging on in the shifting blackness. If this really was the angeleech hiding somewhere in his dream, then Cas had to be somewhere nearby. And sure enough, not far beyond where he had paused to pray to the angel he stumbled upon his own corpse, lying dead on the ground, an angel blade rammed deep inside his chest. And another one, and another one, and probably hundreds of Deans lying all around him, motionless, bloody, and dead. A shudder of unease ran up Dean's spine at the strange sight. Definitely not his own dream.

“Dean?” Dean whirled around when he heard Cas’ voice. OK, step one of the plan had worked. What was the next step again?—Right… Wing it.

Cas was picking his way slowly through the corpses. “Is this a dream or is it reality?” he asked.

“Can’t it be both?”

The angel tilted his head, squinting at Dean, and then slapped him across the face without any prior warning.

“Hey!” Dean yelped, rubbing his cheek.

“I still don’t get how that is supposed to help me tell if you are real or not,” Cas stated.

“Well, you’re not supposed to hit _me_ for starters,” Dean explained.

But Cas wasn’t listening anymore. He was doubling over, breathing hard.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Dean placed a hand on the angel’s back.

“It is getting difficult to keep up my vessel’s functions.”

“Damn,” Dean swore. “The angeleech is hiding out somewhere. How are we supposed to get it if we can’t even friggin’ _find_ it?”

That’s when he remembered Sam telling them, _there is no way to get rid of the leech without killing the host._ They were both asleep, trapped in Rowena’s strange spell-world. Neither just a dream nor reality, but a little bit of both.

Dean let go of Cas, who staggered slightly without his support, and strode over to the nearest Dean-corpse, pulling the angel knife out of its chest. When he returned to Cas, the angel was eyeing the blade warily.

“Here’s another piece of human wisdom about sleeping: You can’t die in dreams,” Dean explained.

“Yes, you can,” Cas contradicted, clutching at Dean as soon as he was close enough to keep him upright.

“Just… trust me, okay?” Dean said. He really hoped his gut was right about this.

“Of course,” Cas said, his head lolling forward onto Dean’s shoulder, letting Dean embrace him, even though Dean was holding an angel blade in his hands. “I trust you.”

Dean carefully pressed the blade against Cas’ throat and made a thin cut. He watched as a few drops of bright blue grace dribbled out and splattered onto the ground between them. An angry hissing sound brought Dean’s attention back to the cut in time to see a black worm-like creature slip from the cut in Cas’ throat, following the grace.

“Dean, wake up!” Sam’s voice echoed all around them.

“Not now, Sammy!” Dean yelled back, even though he knew Sam probably couldn’t hear him. He quickly took out his gun and fired a few rounds into the slimy worm writhing and twisting on the ground by his feet. When he lowered the gun, the leech had been reduced to nothing more than an inky black smear. He took a moment to ensure the thing was well and truly dead, and not one of those obnoxious creatures prone to reforming, before he turned back to check on Cas who had crumbled to the ground the moment Dean had let go of him. _Please be okay!_

“Cas—”

A bucket of ice-cold water hit his face and he woke with a start, sitting up in bed, sputtering and gasping for air.

“Finally.” Sam was standing over him, an empty bucket in his hands. “Everything okay? Your pulse was racing like crazy.”

“I was trapped in a nightmare-land battling a magical grace-sucking super-leech. Of course my pulse was racing!” Dean snapped, looking over at Cas. He was still breathing at least.

“Did you get it?” Sam pressed. “Is Cas gonna be okay?”

“I don’t know.” That was the same question he wanted to ask Sam. “I think I got the leech? I didn’t have time to make sure Cas was okay, though. He was running on a last few drops of grace.” Cas still looked way too pale for Dean’s taste. “I should go back in.”

Dean was already reaching for his nightstand for another sleeping pill when Cas began to stir next to him.

“Cas, you okay?” Sam asked, tossing the bucket aside so that he could fret over the angel properly.

“I believe so,” Cas answered. He blinked a few times, and his eyes started glowing a feint, but definite blue. Immediately, the dried blood vanished from his face.

“Are you kidding me right now?!” Dean groused. “A minute ago you were almost angel toast and you had, like, one drop of grace left.—Just… Take it easy with the grace, will you?” He got out of the bed and went to retrieve a towel to dry off his face that was still wet thanks to Sammy.

“You might be right,” Cas admitted, panting slightly after that display of healing himself. “I believe it will take a while for my grace to replenish on its own.”

“No kidding,” Dean muttered, throwing the towel at the sink.

“Sam. Dean,” Cas began. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you. You really helped me to… kick this angeleech’s butt.”

Dean exchanged a bemused expression with Sam at the choice of words that Cas had undoubtedly picked up from them.

“I could not have done that without you,” Cas continued. “I am in your debt.”

“Nah, none of that,” Dean waved him off.

And Sam added, “It’s what family’s for.” Which was, of course, what Dean had meant. But sometimes Sammy found the right words when Dean couldn’t.

“We’re just glad you’re alright,” Dean said, rubbing at the back of his neck. And then, since this was all getting too mushy, he added, “You should probably get some more rest. Replenish your grace and all. Do you want to go to your own room?”

“No,” Cas simply said, while he was inspecting the bloodstained pillow, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Sam chuckled softly at that, averting eye contact with both Dean and Cas, probably in an attempt not to break out in full-on laughter. “Well, I haven’t slept in a while, either, what with the all-nighter doing research.” He pointed over his shoulder at the door, and couldn’t resist adding, “So _I’m_ gonna be in my room if there are no more emergencies.” The next moment he was gone.

Cas, in the meantime, exchanged the ruined pillow with Dean’s clean one and seemed satisfied with the result because he was lying back down, nestling into the pillow.

“Sure. Or you could… stay here, I guess,” Dean huffed. He tried to sound put out, but it was hard when he was so relieved to have Cas close by so that he could keep an eye on him.

Cas’ only response was to sigh and hug Dean’s pillow closer. A moment later he was snoring softly, and looking more relaxed and at peace than Dean had seen him in... well, possibly more than Dean had ever seen him before .

Dean pursed his lips at the sleeping angel and considered his options. His bed was occupied now and now that the rush of adrenaline was passing, it became apparent that the sleeping pill hadn’t really worn off yet. With a shrug of his shoulders Dean went back to his side of the bed, threw the dirty pillow onto the floor and climbed back into the bed. It was big enough after all. He was just going to rest his eyes for a moment… If anyone asked, it was the sleeping pill’s fault. Not that anyone would ask anyway, since Team Free Will was out for the count at the moment. Just for a teeny tiny moment… Really just a minute… or two… or…

***

Elsewhere, while the Winchesters slept, Rowena was laughing into her tea, no _cackling_ , as she was so caught up thinking about the Winchesters that she had been forced to set the text she had been working on aside after rereading the same line four times.

It wasn’t often that she got the chance to pull one over on the brothers. Not like this, anyways, and how could she be expected to resist such a temptation? The handsome angel would be alright—the Winchesters wouldn’t let him die, she was sure of that. But oh! What she would give to see the look on their faces when they realized what else the spell had done…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, kudos and comments are highly appreciated! <3
> 
> ☆ I just finished another multichapter Team Free Will fic:
> 
>  **[Unthought Known](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17326364/chapters/40760243)** (Summary: _Dean wakes up in an abandoned mental institution with no memories and two strange guys, ‘Sam’ and ‘Castiel.’ They have to work together if they want to find out who they are and what happened to them. And what the hell is this profound bond he seems to share with Castiel?_ , 18.3k)
> 
> ☆ Here's the sequel to Angeleech: **[Under a Witch's Spell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17326364/chapters/40760243)** (Summary: _Cas is under a spell and touching Dean seems to be the only thing that can help him focus his powers._ , 6.4k)


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